Britt-Arnhild's Blue Garden

Cold spring weather

text and images britt-arnhild

While the cherry season has started in Italy, I rejoice in a cherry tree filled with white flowers. Like snowflakes. This is the most flowers we´ve had since we planted the tree a few years ago.
The plum tree also has a great many flowers, and in a couple of days the young apple tree will start blooming with her delicate pink flowers.

Cold spring weather means that the tulips last a long, long time.

Tulip fever.
Or is it tulip love?

 What is the British name of this one?
In Norway we call it "kubjelle" - cow bell.

It is spring in The Blue Garden 

Small spots of wildlife

text and images britt-arnhild

Small spots of wildlife in The Blue Garden.
Hvitveis, Wood Anemones,Anemone Nemorose were my favorite spring flowers when I was a girl.
They grow wild and many people would call them weeds.

In The Blue Garden they are gems rather than weeds.

In Sacred Land, Martin Palmer talks about sacred land in Britain. I read and the music of the words finds resonance in my mind.

Four different types of sacred land. One of them mempries from your childhood. Places you come back to. Places which have a special meaning for you

Not only places. Also flowers are sacred land for me.

Like hvitveis in spring.

The potato field

text and images britt-arnhild

Give spring another week or two, and we are ready to plant potatoes.

Meanwhile we are enjoying the rhuburbs.

Greens for a soup

text and images britt-arnhild

Every year the miracle happens. Green sprouts, perfect for the kitchen. The first brennesle (Latin-urtica) are up. I pick what I find.

Will it be enough for soup for four?

Sping, sprang, sprung!

text and images britt-arnhild

When you live in a part of the world which is covered in snow almost half the year, spring is a new beginning. Every year is like waking up from a long Cinderella sleep.

Every year I am impatience to see more flowers, have warmer temperatures, for summer to come. At the same time I want every spring minute to last an eternity.

For months the garden has been white. White dreams. Dreams of a spring, a summer, an autumn to come. The circle of the year. The perfect circle.

Most of the snow has melted now, and every morning I am out to seek spring.

Spring. Sprang. Sprung.

Spring.

The season to fall in love.

The first primulas

Text and images Britt-Arnhild Wigum Lindland

I have dirt under my nails again, and I love it. My fingers smell of abrodd (is that only a Norwegian name of a wonderful fragrant herb?????) and i love it. My garden muscles are sore after a sunny day out in the garden, and I love it.

The first primulas are blooming, AND I LOVE IT.

....

Mary A. Robinson's Primulas. The Complete Guide was waiting in my mailbox when we came home from our week at the cabin, and I love it.

Stubborn roots

 
You need patience, a lot of patience, if you want to follow the growth in a Nordic April garden. Still there is too much snow, but as it slowly melts, there are new signs every day that life is still living, deep in the soil somewhere.

Here a primula is forcing her way through the ice and snow.

Camellia, Gertrude Jekyll and some sun

Text and images Britt Arnhild Wigum Lindland

 
Sunny, bright, snowmelting and absolutely fabulous in the southers wall of The House in the Woods.

 
My camellia is moved out to enjoy the spring together with me, the biography about Gertrude Jekyll is filling my heart with garden dreams.

 
Life is perfectly good on a Nordic spring day.